I was struck by a developing on-line petition to the Government to set up a 'National Nature Service' and found myself asking 'why?'. After all, we have various Country Agencies, innumerable Wildlife Trusts and specialists charities, and of course the National Parks, The Canals Trust, various Rivers Trusts and Groundwork! The list is considerable and all fill particular niches, so why do we need another?
To me, that simply means yet another hierachy of management - high-paid jobs for people who probably are already in a job. And then of course it would generate another tier of work - meetings! Innumerable meetings between the various organisations. Co-ordinators etc would also be needed. And, if there was a body for the environment, surely there would need to be commensurate measures for many other parts of society - be it museums, theatres, family groups, heritage sites, youth groups - a very long list could be developed.
Moreover, why special effort for environmental jobs, when the majority of the work will be pretty menial because, of necessity, you won't be getting highly skilled people off the streets. Realistically, the main client-base will be the young, relatively unskilled and at least in some cases people with all-manner of problems. I'm not doubting that the age-range will be broader, but from what I have seen so far, it looks as though mass-unemployment is likely to emerge from redundancies in the service sectors. So, we need to think about skills that will got those people back into work. We must also think of where that work will be.
A National Nature Service that depends upon Government funding means that at some time the need for the service from the unemployed will diminish. We saw that with Manpower Services from about 1986 onwards. As the economy recovered, the pool of long-term unemployed shrank. In my experience, projects set up to employ large numbers of people because they needed numbers to deliver working capital, have a very limited life. Worse still, as the available employee pool shrank, the proportion of people with real problems grew. In the case of one project I ran for four years, drugs became the issue and try as I might I could not get any action to clean out the dealers! So, there will be some happy memories of what MSC did for some people (I was lucky but at times the job was very stressful). There will be others where there were more reasons for complaint by employees.
Nevertheless, there will be a need to do something and the MSC model has some merits. However, those merits are also countered by drawbacks. I therefore urge the Government to do some careful research before setting up any scheme. Go back and determine what the good and bad bits of MSC were. What can we learn from those schemes and how might one design a package that delivered both for the unemployed and for those that have the potential to provide work placements in whatever form they might take? Most importantly how to design a package that is robust enough to take out problems quickly. The death-knell of my scheme was the day we had to adhere to Local Authority employment procedures. As an example, I will tell the story of one chap that worked for me.
Fred (not his real name) had done a stretch for drugs and was now out and about. He had been a roadie for several big bands and was quite a character. He was also bone idle! I spent a whole year running disciplinaries trying to get rid of him but every time the process exhonerated him! At the end of his year he came in to see me and said - 'goodbye Roger - you were the only one who had worked me out'! (I'd have to say not just me but also my 'ganger'). That problem was compounded by similar problems trying to get rid of dealers and eventually it killed the project. We went from 60% going on to other permanent jobs to about 20%. Worse still, I could no longer ring up prospective employers and say 'I've a great guy - do you need anybody' - too often the response was 'I don't want dross from MSC'.
So, please Mr Johnson et al. think this out and create something that works for the unemployed and is flexible enough to make it attractive for prospective employers. There is a pool of experience from the 1980s - perhaps it is time to call on that experience and use it to design a 'world-class' recovery project.
